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Geek Review: Fat Princess Adventures (PS4)

Put away your cake-fueled dreams of competitive class-based multiplayer game because this is not your daddy’s Fat Princess (or your Fat Princess from like five years ago, even). Adventures is a cooperative hack ‘n slash campaign with three of your best friends (or by yourself if, like me, you just happen to mostly hate other people) so that will take some getting used to for fans of the original.

Stuff Your Face With Cake

The story is a pretty simple one: instead of fighting each other, the Kingdoms have signed a truce to fight against the Bitter Queen, who is busy kidnapping every fat princess she can find. You play as a sort of mercenary that just happens to jump out of an airship as the Bitter Queen first attacks the two Kingdoms. You are immediately thrust into the action, hacking and slashing against evil goblins, knights, spiders, and assorted other baddies.

But only after deciding your character’s gender, hair, eye color, etc. You can continue to change these attributes as the game progresses, along with your character’s class. You start out as a Warrior, but every once in a while, you’ll get a chance to change to an Archer, Mage, or Engineer at various checkpoints scattered across the game. Each has unique actions and characteristics (like the Archer’s ability to shoot enemies at range, the Warrior’s ability to soak up damage, and the Engineer’s ability to disarm bombs littered across the landscape). Each class also has multiple upgrades so that you can upgrade primary and secondary weapons, as well as armor and hats/helmets.

When switching between classes and upgrading all your bits isn’t enough to kill all the bad guys on screen, you can always stuff your face with cake to become a fattened version of yourself and smash everything around you with your now enormous meathooks. And when even that’s not enough, you can always drink some Awesome Sauce and become a super-powerful version of yourself that will withstand all (it is important to note ‘Awesome Sauce’ is my favourite phrase of all time and nothing else will matter in this review). Cake drops when enemies are defeated, and your Awesome Sauce meter will fill as you battle through the sweet world (though you can always drink the Awesome Sauce potions littered throughout the world to hurry the process along).

The hack ‘n’ slash gameplay can get a bit repetitive as you progress, especially if you decide you’d like to stick to one class throughout the game (the Warrior and Engineer are clearly the best). And it’s not a very long game, so you might be left thinking that maybe you didn’t get your money’s worth at the end of the day.

Awesome Sauce!

The game does retain some competitive gameplay, but it’s competition you kind of have make up on your own. As I said before, you can play with up to three friends either online or on the couch. Ultimately, you have work together to progress, but that doesn’t mean you always have to get along. The upgraded armor and weapons are first come first served, so if your buddy grabs that Flaming Sword that you really needed first, then you’re plum out of luck. And if you happen to die while there’s some good loot lying around, then you’re just gonna have to wait to get resurrected.

As in all good RPGs and Lite RPGs (which Adventures resembles), your character levels the more enemies it defeats. To help your leveling along, there are also a few fetch quests embedded in the game in the form of couriering letter back and forth between couples in love, getting mechanics to fix planetariums, and finding hung over guards trying to sleep it off all over town.

Probably the most fun aspect of the game, though, is the completely unnecessary blood and gore toggle. You can turn it completely off, of course, and have a pretty kid-safe game on your hands, but if you’re playing with a group of adults, there is nothing more satisfying that having your fat avatar slap a pirate until it dies and explodes in a bloody mess all over everything and everybody (I’m not a sociopath, I promise; I’ve been tested).

Besides the blood and gore, Adventures has a very cartoony look and feel. Everything is cute, bubbly and pastel-coloured, and it really only gets moreso as you progress. Even the boss monsters are cute as hell, and remain as such until their inevitable explosion in blood and gore.

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Review overview

Gameplay8

Story6

Presentation8

Value6

Summary

While lot of the feel is kept from the original Fat Princess, Fat Princess Adventures retains very little of the gameplay. It is instead a very fun and funny hack ‘n’ slasher that is cute and bloody as hell, but is unfortunately much too short.

Adan has worked for comic book stores, book stores, and gaming stores. And a hoagie sandwich shop once. Now he writes and edits all sorts of things. He loves comics, LEGOs, books, games (analog and video), Doctor Who, sandwiches, and his wife, Felicia. Not in that order, though.

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